<p>Bay, I have noticed that you have a lot of questions for me. I do not mean to be rude, hence this post. I cannot converse with someone who made that obnoxious nose-picking comment about current UCB students, while alluding that Asians are nose pickers. Thank you for understanding. </p>
<p>I will correct you if you misrepresent my positions, but that’s the most I am willing to go to.</p>
<p>I think if Harvard admitted evenly across the entire SAT spectrum, then SAT would be highly correlated with academic performance during the degree. If nearly everyone is over 700’s, then not much correlation.</p>
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<p>Can you please give me an example of the above that you have seen a high-school student successfully perform? In your experience, how common is that? And how much more common is running a student organization (say, captain of the crew team) as proof of leadership skills?</p>
<p>My son has several classmates at Yale who started their own charities–real, legit charities–of various kinds. I’ve also seen a number of high-school kids do this–some impressive, some kind of cheesy. Colleges can probably tell the difference. As for musicians, he knows kids who were on “From the Top,” who have played concertos with professional orchestras, who appear on professional recordings, who transferred from Juilliard and Eastman, etc., in addition to winning a slew of prizes. I mention these things just to confirm that the most selective schools can and do admit kids with a wide array of impressive achievements. This is relevant to both parts of this discussion–with respect to URMs, the ones HYPS takes are still amazing kids, but who might not stand out compared to the larger numbers of whites and Asians with higher stats, as was noted above. With respect to high-scoring Asians (and whites), it explains why some kids who are “just” all-state violinists with 2350 SATs and 4.0’s don’t get in.</p>
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<p>There is only one way for anyone to interpret this response, and it is that you cannot defend your position. You are cowardly not to admit it.</p>
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No, I’m too busy relaxing in Stately Hunt Manor in my tony Maryland suburb to worry too much about any of them.</p>
<p>IP,
Just to clarify my position on UCB, it was the second choice of both of my Ds, behind H and Y, and one I supported.</p>
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<p>Running a student organization is much more common, and in itself is not necessarily proof of outstanding leadership skills. It can be; it cannot be; it has to be looked at in terms of the level, constancy, of that leadership, what has been accomplished under that leadership, the student’s possible reflection on that in an essay, etc.</p>
<p>An example of high performance in leadership is a student whose file I recently saw who was admitted to an elite with excellent but not outstanding test scores & gpa, but clearly exceptional levels of leadership and sacrifice – leadership which was pertinent to her particular major which I will not disclose. This is definitely a future leader, politically, with passion and ideals demonstrated in her practical commitment to national and international causes, over several years. She is not a URM. If anything, she can be called an ORM.</p>
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<li><p>Of course I am not opposed “to the idea of URMs [sic] actually attending elite u’s.” I don’t believe anyone has ever demonstrated on this thread that I “harbor [any] prejudice against them due to their race.”</p></li>
<li><p>I have never denied that subjective criteria exist and are considered. I have only expressed my bewilderment at Hunt’s posts (e.g. #4190) that defined holistic admissions and then suggested that elites do not practice it: [A]re you really proposing that the elites should de-emphasize scores to the point of taking kids with, say, CR SAT of 600 as long as they have other sterling qualities? That’s pretty interesting.</p></li>
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<p>For the record, I am fine with geographic and socioeconomic preferences. I’m even OK with athletic preferences. Legacies I’m a bit torn on, but I’m OK with development admits as their admission is contingent on a substantial donation to the institution, a donation that is likely to have tangible benefits as opposed to weak “classroom diversity” benefits.</p>
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<li><p>I have no problems with “holistic” admissions. I have simply and consistently stated that it does not have to consider racial classification and that it is a fallacy to argue that opposing racial preferences means supporting “quantitative, scaleable admissions criteria [only].”</p></li>
<li><p>The SAT isn’t everything, nor is it nothing.</p></li>
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<p>Since your first four points are mostly correct and written in good faith, I hope you can better understand my position and perhaps more generally those of others who oppose racial preferences.</p>
<p>I am opposed to the consideration of racial classification in admissions because I believe in treatment without regard to racial classification. Categorizing people this way has caused so much harm in the past; I am unconvinced that using it for “good” in fact does any good. My position really is as simple as that.</p>
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<p>Thanks, fab. I don’t believe I have heard you state your position so succinctly before.</p>
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<li>Do racial preferences really boost the number of middle class "URM"s? I have already stated many pages back that according to Thomas Sowell, “As of 1940, 87 percent of black families had incomes below the official poverty line. By 1960, this was down to 47 percent of black families…During the decade of the 1970s, the poverty rate among black families fell from 30 percent to 29 percent.”</li>
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<p>Of course we can never know what the rate would’ve been in the absence of racial preferences. But to finish quoting Sowell, “Even if all of this one-percentage point decline were arbitrarily attributed to affirmative action, it would still not be a significant part of the history of the economic rise of blacks out of poverty…” (Affirmative Action Around The World, pages 119-120). </p>
<p>And if you think one decade is “too soon” to tell, how about from 1967 to 1992? [D]uring the period from 1967 to 1992-- most of this being in the affirmative action era-- the top 20 percent of black income-earners had their income share rising at about the same rate as that of their white counterparts, while the bottom 20 percent of black income-earners had their income share fall at more than double the rate of the bottom 20 percent of white income earners…Neither the gains nor the losses can be arbitrarily attributed to affirmative action, but neither can affirmative action claim to have advanced low-income blacks when in fact those blacks fell behind.</p>
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<li><p>From the same reasoning as above, does it really?</p></li>
<li><p>Did the “acting white” problem always exist among blacks? No. When did it first emerge? We’re getting back to a question you asked earlier as to why so many black children are in single-parent homes. That is a problem that has WORSENED over time; that is, the farther we are from the days of slavery and Jim Crow, the WORSE the rates become. Why is that?</p></li>
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Kids like this get into HYPM all the time from our school. (And with Jewish and Italian last names too.)</p>
<p>Plenty black kids have Irish names.</p>
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Here is an [url=<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1155321-colleges-racist-240.html#post12904225]example.[/url”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1155321-colleges-racist-240.html#post12904225]example.[/url</a>]
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<p>fabrizio, I don’t really want to rehash all those arguments about impacts. Plenty of smart people think it does help, and my experience confirms that. I suspect that Sowell’s interpretation stacks the numbers, but I’m not going to invest the time to examine them. Certainly, the elite schools think that it’s a good thing to do.</p>
<p>But I always thought your objection was not to the ineffectiveness of affirmative action, but to the principle of using racial classifications. Would proof that AA really helps overcome social problems of URM change your position on the issue?</p>
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<p>That is a vague example at best. What exactly was the leadership achievement? What did she do?</p>
<p>IndianParent,</p>
<p>Not every outstanding accomplishment wins an “award.” What about those students whose high schools don’t give awards or recommend students for awards, when they have accomplished just as much as the award-winning students? Like awards based on CS hours. Or high schools that don’t have NHS. Or students from high schools that have counselors who spend all their time with troubled students and don’t know anything about awards.</p>
<p>They will get the shaft from AdCom IndianParent, as soon as he takes over Harvard’s admissions dept.</p>
<p>An example of leadership might be a boy who is an Eagle Scout–and this is a good example, because people in the school might not know anything about it. A kid who is an Eagle Scout has, at the least, held leadership positions in a troop for several years, and has managed a substantial service project, usually involving hundreds of hours of work by multiple people. Usually, he has been the Senior Patrol Leader of a troop of boys, meaning that he is the primary youth leader for the organization–and if it’s a well-run troop, the boys really do provide the primary leadership. The Girl Scouts’ Gold Award is similar.</p>
<p>JohnWesley,
"I don’t buy it. Stop trying to dumb-down the word, “global”. "</p>
<p>IMHO, That statement sounds as idiotic as the one you are calling idiotic. You can’t order people around to do your bidding. If someone wants to dumb down the word GLOBAL, it is their prerogative and you cant do squat about it.</p>
<p>Fabrizio wrote:
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<p>You’re assuming that the bottom 20% of all Black income-earners is at all comparable to the bottom 20% of all white income-earners. That’s a huge assumption. Likewise, the top 20%. We’d have to know what the wage-earners actually earn to really compare apples to apples.</p>